Servers down?

I've been waiting for 15 minutes now, considering it's school holidays I would expect there to be people playing. It even says there is 400 people searching ( not sure if that is BS stats or not...) . I checked the steam server browser and there are 30 servers all empty... Is it literaly only me searching or are the servers down in AU?

@zucchini not down for me and im east coast US

I'm in NZ, preferring AU servers (obviously), and every time I get into a game it's me alone or one other player.

Unless the Australasian playerbase all got bored at the same time, I think something is broken.

@zucchini

BS stats? Are you saying that NWI puts false numbers of how many are online? LMAO...ive heard some foil hat crazyness in my youth...but wow.

last edited by Max80

Im on US servers and there's only ever a max of 400ish ppl on at any given time in coop and versus (like 4 pll on comp lol). Sometimes it still takes a while or puts me in small games.

Checking the servers always shows them as down for me, but ppl r obviosuly playing somehow so that's something else.

I think its just due to the relatively small player count. Its just a statistical thing. There will be times when there simply aren't enough players not in a game to make a new game.

Furthermore, even though I'm not sure exactly how the matchmaking system works, it probably attempts to consolidate players into games by some algorithm that attempts to minimize average wait times. That being said, the system may be focused on the average rather than removing outliers.

What I mean by this is... lets say you click to join a game. Almost all players are in a game and no one has actually clicked to join at that moment anywhere else in the region you're in. No one else clicks for say 30 secs and you're still waiting all alone. Now after say a minute, a match ends and everyone who played in that match clicks next round. The matchmaking system will prioritize all those people over you, because it will result in an overall lower average wait time than if it broke that group up, included you, then generated two new games.

This is of course just one scenario I can think of and there are probably more. I find that you can cheese this in most matchmaking systems by cancelling and retrying every minute. This resets your waittime and makes the system stop skipping you over. I'd never let the timer go past like 2 mins, I'd redo it at that point.

last edited by thehappybub